A Psalm Of Life

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1838

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

War

In the poem, war symbolizes the dark dramatic vision the young man offers of life itself as a hyper-charged environment of perpetual conflict and dramatic challenges, although Longfellow resists drawing on any actual conflict. Born too late to recall the American Revolution and too young to remember the War of 1812, Longfellow here uses the concept of battle as a heroic symbol that draws as much the myths and legends of Antiquity as it does his own nation’s history. In Antiquity, war becomes a test of the young man’s courage and commitment. In Stanza 5, the poem develops an extended metaphor in imagining life itself as a long and broad field of battle, each person’s life a kind of temporary encampment in a much wider conflict that goes on and on. Using war as his symbol for life, Longfellow suggests that heroism comes not from cowardice but from confrontation, not from shirking from the challenges of conflict but rather rising to their call. The poem uses the symbol of war to offer a dramatic choice that is really no choice at all: be like one of those battle-tested heroes who define themselves and their mettle in the very thick of conflict with vision and confidence or be cannon fodder, terrified of the challenges, retreating into passivity, acting like a farm cow, driven, unspectacular, and inglorious. For the young man, advice is simple: If life is a battle, “Be a hero in the strife!” (Line 20).

Shipwreck

For all its much-heralded optimism and its pop cultural legacy of offering unflagging hope and can-do determination, the poem uses at a dramatic midway moment the symbol of a shipwreck. The shipwreck suggests that all is not rosy and optimistic in life and that each person must expect, really anticipate, difficult experiences that leave the feeling of being adrift in midocean, despondent and overwhelmed.

In the 1830s, a shipwreck was no symbol. It was a terrifying reality for a New England economy that relied on the fishing industry to harvest its oceans despite the dangers. A shipwreck was for Longfellow’s culture what a plane wreck is for a contemporary reader, a terrifying reality that evidences how quickly and how absolutely systems can fail, errors in judgment can be made, and the consequent losses can be catastrophic. Longfellow uses the potent cultural reality as a symbol for how life can turn dark. Even though history is the record of great lives who rose to the challenges of life, the young man acknowledges, perhaps in reference to his own situation, that there are those—and he does not disparage them or mock their weakness (in fact, he calls them brothers)—who struggle to rise to the challenges. The poem uses these shipwrecked brothers as symbols of those who get discouraged, are tempted to give up heart, the despondent, and those who despair not because they are cowards or because they are weak but because troubles can come too suddenly, too swiftly, too absolutely, like conditions at sea that suddenly disable, even sink the sturdiest and best manned ships. To those “forlorn” (Line 31), the young man offers nothing less than the poem itself, its lines like footprints discovered on a beach where the shipwrecked sailors wash ashore, a reassuring rallying point, a way to touch the spirit at its darkest moments and encourage it to “take heart again” (Line 32), a challenge directed as much to the young man himself as his readers.

Footprints in the Sand

The poem uses the striking image of footprints in the sand to suggest the weight and impact of human achievement from heroic individuals who rose to the challenge of life and managed to leave an inspirational legacy. The lines (26-32) in which the poem talks of the great achievements from the past, achievements that offer hope to those who come later like footprints in the sands of time, are among the most often quoted lines not only from Longfellow but from the canon of 19th-century American poetry. The lines, with their tonic confirmation of the resilience of human effort, are an integral part of the poem’s enduring mass-market appeal.

The symbol, however, is not as simple as its embrace by pop culture might indicate. In the symbol, Longfellow suggests not the durability and permanence of human achievement in the face of life’s vicissitudes but rather the opposite. One of the favorite themes of British Romantic poetry was the ephemeral nature of human achievement, how quickly and utterly are forgotten what appear at the moment of their construction to be durable edifices, defying the limits of time. As such, from the Pyramids onward, these grand monuments are more monuments to humanity’s folly and hubris. In the poem, the footprints suggest not permanence and durability but rather the community of those who in the immediate draw on the inspiration of each other despite the reality of the ephemeral reality of all human endeavor.

Longfellow’s generation, for instance, could draw its inspiration from the generation before, America’s first Great Generation, which secured American independence against all odds, despite the broad historical reality that the sands of time eventually will consign the American Revolution to the same obscurity of the great wars that tested Egypt or China millennia ago. In the poem, these footprints, then, are just permanent enough to inspire, reassuring enough to lift spirits here and now.